What a hegira this has been, from the first day I called for a box of research materials at the Duke University Library to the pile of manuscript pages lying beside my computer.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
Doris Duke in Pictures and the Deconstruction of the Past
My chapters about Doris’ war-time service are some of the most revealing, and most controversial, in my upcoming biography.
When Words Really Matter
I have never really understood the importance of words until I taught ten undergraduates at Western Kentucky University four days ago.
Black Pip in the First Snowfall
The snowfall heralds real winter, even though our aspens are still golden, leading me to plan the season’s reading in the hope of more evenings spent quietly by the fire.
Doris Duke Takes Another Step
I wonder what Doris would think if she could sit at the breakfast table with my editor and me and talk about who the book’s readers will be.
Women Writing Women’s Lives
To speak to my peers, who know exactly where I am coming from as a writer and a feminist, is such a rare and compelling treat.
Cleaning Out My Outhouse
I enjoy my outhouse because it is in my view transgressive. I enjoy transgressions and I miss the energy of evil… the shaking of the roots of our assumptions… in most of the contemporary fiction I read and even in a lot of the fiction I write.
“As Writers We Never Know the Way We Impact Others…”
The world as we know it would grind to a halt if all the talented women—millions of us—insisted on their primacy and the primacy of the conditions they need in order to create.
You Are Not Alone
Whether in total isolation or in the compromised solitude most of us suffer, writers create characters whom our readers recognize, care about, and remember; this is the strand that connects us all.
Doris Duke Moves into the Limelight
I am now reading, and occasionally wrestling with, what might be call the collision—or the creative cooperation—of two minds, essentially different: the mind of the writer and the mind of the editor.